it's still important to instill those concepts so that when you get to the more difficult, complicated real world problems, those concerns are on your mind.

First time my code is on par with the top result. I usually feel like a noob coder at this point but not today. Woohoo!

It's a trivial problem with no real implications outside the kata world. I think the servers will survive a little extra work... 1000 runs with this algorithm clocks in at 0.035s. Yours takes 0.023s less ;)

Mmmmmkay

wow, ur a genius!

This is not beautiful, it is a waste of processing resources. Sorting every word is awful. Just Hash it with O(n). Sorting is O(nlog(n))

nice code

Nice, good job!

That's why I threw a quick "ary = words.chars and" in front of my words.select

This is brilliant. Thanks!

Nice one-liner, but you are wasting a lot of cycles repeatedly calling "word.chars.sort". I would recommend assigning that to a variable right off and then use that variable in your select.

if default value is a hash, this has a risk of returning a value within default, instead of default.